As is known in the art, coding formats available today, such as barcodes, are useful due to their various applications including coding of manufacturer's product information such as books and other merchandise. Additionally, barcodes have been used for tracking purposes such as to track the movement of certain items including rental cars, airline luggage, nuclear waste, mail, express mail, and other parcels. Conventionally, current barcode scanners or readers are designed for use with grey scale images. This limits their capability as the imaging sensor technology is now largely driven by the consumer camera market where color sensors with continually increasing resolutions and greater light level sensitivities are desired. One way to address this issue has been to design barcode decoding algorithms that process color images directly. However, this is not feasible for many uses as such barcode decoders are computationally intensive and also expensive for current mass market use. Additionally, redesign of current greyscale barcode decoders to provide color barcode decoding is not feasible as it is expensive in terms of labour and time.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a solution for barcode scanning that obviates or mitigates at least some of the above mentioned disadvantages.